How Donald Trump Could Stop Being a Coward

I have never witnessed children suffocate from a chemical weapons attack, so the worst thing I have ever seen as a reporter remains the dead women and children that were piled up as a protest in front of the American Embassy in Monrovia during the waning days of the Liberian civil war. It was 2003 and the United States had just invaded Iraq. I didn’t know what to do before the tangle of bodies before me so I decided to count them. Someone should know this number, I thought. They had died earlier in the day when a mortar hit a crowd of civilians who had sought refuge in an annex of the U.S. embassy, and as I counted the bodies, a crowd of angry Liberians gathered around me. I wrote the number “27” in my notebook. I felt completely numb. “Where is your army?” the men in the crowd started to yell. “Why won’t you invade us?”

Most of my liberal friends oppose military actions on humanitarian grounds, but the truth is that such measures often reduce civilian deaths. A few weeks after I counted those bodies in my notebook, a couple hundred U.S. marines finally came ashore in Liberia, bringing an end to a decade-long civil war without firing a shot. The British had accomplished more or less the same thing with two weeks of combat in neighboring Sierra Leone. The civil wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were also stopped, with more difficulty, by NATO air power. Even the situation in Afghanistan improved once the U.S. got there, in 2001. Civilian casualties in the ongoing civil war dropped as soon as Taliban fighters started targeting American soldiers rather than Afghan civilians, and went back up as soon as we pulled out. Intervention isn't always the most peaceful option, but the problem with absolute pacifism is that it inexorably leads to absolute isolationism, and therein lies one of the great facilitators of war and repression around the globe.

VIDEO: The Refugee Crisis in Lebanon: On the Ground with Syria’s Lost Populace

I am a political liberal who was stunned and disturbed by Trump’s electoral victory last November. I abhor war and will turn off the television when confronted with excessive combat footage. But when Trump gave the order to drop 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian air base that had launched a nerve gas attack against civilians, I found it hard to articulate an objection. God forbid we live in a world, I thought, where there are no repercussions whatsoever for using nerve gas. A week later, the U.S. military dropped a massive GBU-43 bomb on an ISIS tunnel complex outside Jalalabad, Afghanistan, reportedly killing scores of fighters. I first visited Jalalabad in the summer of 1996, shortly before the Taliban swept into power, and I remember an Afghan man pointing up at those same mountains and telling me, There are Arabs up there training for war, and if I go up there, they will kill me. And this is my country, not theirs. When I heard about the bomb drop last week, I remembered the indignation of that Afghan man. Assad and ISIS are enemies of humanity, and it’s entirely possible for a peace-loving person to find himself hoping that every last one of them dies under a GBU-43.

The legal basis for such a wish was firmly established in the wake of World War II as the four Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. These laws were rooted in ancient moral norms, rather than treaties, and therefore covered all people in all countries. Until 1949, governments could conduct mass atrocities against their own civilians without breaking any laws, but the conventions gave the international community the right—or, as some would argue, the duty—to intervene. When Trump ordered air strikes in response to Assad’s use of nerve gas, he was well within the bounds of international law.

The problem isn’t the bombs, though, it’s the man. I have no doubt that Assad used nerve agents against his people, but not because my president said so; I believe Assad used nerve gas because an array of news and human-rights organizations have said so. After claiming innumerable falsehoods about matters both grave and petty—and disparaging those same organizations that he now relies on—Trump has arguably forfeited the right to be credited for telling the truth. Other people will have to do that for him.

The other problem, and I don’t say this lightly, is that our president is a coward. There are many kinds of cowards. Physical cowards will abandon their platoon, their friends, or their family in the face of danger, and I have no reason to believe that Trump would do such a thing. In the face of gunfire he may well stand firm as a rock. Then there are moral cowards, who refrain from speaking their mind or standing on principle out of fear of retribution, and Trump is certainly not one of those. During the campaign, he repeatedly violated core tenets of his own party, such as disparaging John McCain’s military service, without appearing to care about the consequences. Whether you agreed with him on those matters or not, Trump is certainly not a moral coward.

But then there is a third form of cowardice: the abuse of the weak by the powerful. This is arguably the worst form because instead of just diminishing the coward, it diminishes us all. During the campaign, Trump imitated a disabled reporter at a rally, mocked Carly Fiorina’s face and insulted a Gold Star family. All of these people were smaller, poorer, or weaker than Trump, and he could attack them from complete safety. If a man acted that way at my dinner table, I would throw him out of my house.

In a sense, my heart goes out to him. Studies have shown that not only are the vast majority of bullies exposed to violence and abuse at home, but over half go on to commit theft, burglary and assault as adults. Bad behavior almost always has an identifiable origin, and Trump’s extreme lack of gallantry may well be evidence of real neglect or abuse as a child. If so, his statement about how images of dying children moved him to take action in Syria made a kind of sense. The suffering of children affects everybody, but those who, themselves, suffered as children may be particularly sensitive to it.

Still, where does Trump’s particular form of cowardice leave the rest of us? He is our president and commander in chief. Clearly his sensitivity about children has not induced him to allow any of them refuge in this country. But what might his bullying behavior on the campaign trail look like on the world stage?

Most obviously, I worry that Trump will try to look tough with countries that can’t really hurt us, like Syria or Mexico, while appeasing countries that can. Trump did not invent this strategy; it forms the basis of dominance hierarchies throughout the animal kingdom. Aggressive displays help reduce conflict by intimidating rivals, while truly dangerous dominant males are placated through ritual self-humiliation. In that sense, Mexico’s weak economy or Syria’s decrepit air force are perfect targets for Trump’s confrontational behavior since they signal a willingness to take action without really putting the country at risk. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, poses not only a nuclear threat to the United States, but also a strategic threat to our interests abroad. Russian combat aircraft have buzzed our warships, Russian bombers have made runs at our coastlines, and Putin himself has made veiled threats about the possibility of war. Trump has not even publicly acknowledged these incidents.

VIDEO: The Trump Administration’s Ties to Russia

Even more odd, Trump has largely avoided the issue of Russian meddling in the presidential election. For a thin-skinned alpha male like Trump, such interference would seem to be the diplomatic equivalent of insulting a man’s wife or smacking his kid; surely it would demand retaliation. Not only did Trump refuse to condemn the interference, he attacked the very intelligence agencies charged with defending America from such threats, all of which has led to considerable intrigue.

Liberal critics speculate that Trump did so to conceal the nefarious connections between his campaign and Russian intelligence, but it’s also possible that Trump is simply scared of Putin. I think he is scared of him politically, militarily, and even physically. Not only is Putin the only world leader at the moment who could inflict devastating harm on this country, he is a martial arts expert who has extensive experience in the brutal world of Soviet intelligence. Trump, on the other hand, dodged military service because of bone spurs and has lived a life of softness and luxury. It’s not hard to figure out who would win that fight.

I know this is an exceedingly base and simple analysis, but keep in mind that we are discussing a man who bragged about his penis size on national television. Male dominance and submission gets negotiated at precisely that crass, comparative level, and one of the reasons that Trump is so incredibly successful in both business and politics is because he intuitively understands this. If you use force to dominate others, however, you will be excruciatingly aware of those who can use force to dominate you, and Trump has clearly decided that Putin is one of those people.

Still, there is a way for Trump to turn this around. The obverse of bullying the vulnerable is protecting them, and Donald Trump has inherited a world where an awful lot of people need protecting. If Trump really wants to be the decisive badass that voters think they elected, he could do a staggering amount of good by embracing that particular form of strength. The smallest part of waging war is launching missiles or dispatching special ops teams; much of the rest of it involves protecting civilians caught in the crossfire. If you don’t do that, many of those civilians will be forced to join militias, and you will wind up fighting them along with everyone else. A truly bold move by our president would be to establish an open-ended refugee program for any country where we are conducting military operations—including Syria. Of course these refugees would be closely vetted and monitored, but such a program would send an unequivocal message about our country’s basic sense of mercy and justice in the world.

It would also be the ultimate demonstration of Donald Trump’s immense and benevolent power. Put in those terms, he may just go for it. That would truly be a step toward making him the great leader that I’m sure he longs to be.

Sebastian Junger is author of Tribe and co-director of the documentaries Restrepo and Hell on Earth.